In Madurai, City of Movie Theatres
When you speak Tamil to someone from Madurai, you will notice that they use the word donkey quite a lot — but they will say “kaluthai.” I don’t understand their fascination with donkeys – but be that as it may…
Even a donkey that grazes exclusively on cinema posters would not have starved in this city — Madurai, my father’s hometown, was dotted with that many cinema halls! It was once home to Asia’s largest cinema, Thangam Theatre, which, by many accounts, could seat over 2500 people. Even in a city with many theatres, superlatives count for something.
Every summer, we went to Madurai to spend school vacations with our grandparents. Back then, we lived in Bombay and wasn’t every other place in India supposed to be boring by comparison? But my brother and I did have something to look forward to in this city of ancient temples. Appa disdained films; Perippa, my father’s brother, was one of Madurai’s many movie-crazy residents. In those hot summer months, Perippa took us to the cinema theatre to watch Hollywood films. During the rest of the year, he watched films in other languages – Tamil, Hindi, and Chinese martial arts films, dubbed in English — he didn’t miss anything or so we thought. Recently, thanks to a short video on YouTube, I realized that as a teen, Perippa had missed a landmark Tamil film, screened in his very backyard.
Flashback Time
The year was 1952.C. Rajagopalachari, “Rajaji,” was the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. By all accounts, he did not think much of the new medium of the movies. Many conservatives thought films would corrupt young minds. Unsurprisingly, my grandparents who lived in Kakkathoppe Street in Madurai had much the same views on films. Their sons attended Sethupathi Boys High School nearby. This is the school where the revolutionary poet, Subramaniya Bharathiar had taught Tamil in 1904 for almost a whole year as a substitute teacher, just before he went underground to evade arrest by the British.
Despite the misgivings of the conservatives in the Kakkathoppe Street who were worried about the influence of the movies on the younger generation, there was no denying the buzz as Thangam Theatre came up in this neighborhood – the construction went on for two years. Thangam opened for business right around October 17, which was Deepavali Day that year. Tickets for the best seats in the house were printed on blingy gold foil – “thangam” literally means gold in Tamil.
No one could have predicted this on opening night, but Sivaji Ganesan, who made his debut appearance in Parasakthi, would skyrocket to fame — unlike his rival, the beloved film star and politician MGR, who toiled as an extra for at least a decade before becoming a star. To this day, Sivaji is the voice of Tamil, to many speakers of the language worldwide. The film’s scriptwriter, M. Karunanidhi, would go on to be elected chief minister of Tamil Nadu five times. The plot of Parasakthi was a vehicle for the ideology of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, DMK, a political party formed in 1949. It may be no exaggeration to say that the film changed the trajectory of politics in Tamil Nadu and, by extension, the fate of its people.
Set in the tumultuous years of World War II, Parasakthi tells the story of a young woman whose three older brothers live and work in Burma. Because of the war, they are unable to attend her wedding, but soon after she becomes a mother, and a widow, in quick succession, and suffers great hardship as a woman with no male protectors. When she tries to kill herself and her infant son, she is promptly arrested — the life of citizens belongs to the state, she is told. In a conventionally happy ending, she is reunited with her family – there is no coming into her own, no remarriage for the widow. The privileged family resolves to serve the less fortunate in their land of birth.
Sivaji, who plays the widow’s youngest brother, channeled the Tamil people’s heartfelt resentment against the upper classes in the form of trenchant dialogue. In 1947, the British left India, but to many it was as if one set of callous rulers had been replaced by another. Parasakthi demanded social reform. In the city of Madras the film said, there would be no homeless families sleeping on sidewalks, no human-pulled rickshaws, and for the common people there would be taps of potable water, which would never run dry. (Later DMK — did manage to achieve one of these three casually stated goals.) The film ran to a full house for over 100 days in Thangam theatre.
Because Thangam theatre was not soundproof initially, people who lived nearby could hear the songs from Parasakhti, though incendiary dialogue was drowned out by the sound of applause. My father still sings that song in praise of the sharing ways of crows, with the refrain Kaa Kaa Kaa and the whirly O Rasikum Seemane, featuring the danseuse Kamala Lakshman in a proto-item number. Then there are the serious songs. Nenju Porukkuthillaiye, fashioned from Bharathiar’s verse, says the poor cannot figure out why they are trapped in some eternal famine; Porule Illaarkku asks if the have-nots can ever get a shot at making a good life. In short, someone has to help the poor find a way out of poverty. The film ended with a song which translates to “Everyone Should Prosper” featuring stock footage of leaders of the Dravidian ideology.
The conservatives of Tamil Nadu were scandalized and asked the Central Board of Film Certification for a reappraisal of the film — they wanted the movie banned. In Madurai, rumors were rife that the movie would be pulled from theatres any time. Theatre owners being the shrewd businessmen they were, capitalized on the rumor. The feared ban never happened. Instead, the public flocked to the theatre in record numbers. There was no rebottling this genie. The film would sweep in the winds of change — after this movie where every sentence had political and social echoes, the old Raja, Rani movies set in some nameless kingdoms of yore were out.
Parasakthi was a dream debut for the cavernous new theatre. Perippa must have most certainly pestered my grandparents for money to go watch the much talked about film. In response, I can picture my mild-mannered grandfather clucking no; my grandmother would’ve whacked her eldest son hard with her palm fan. They did not give him money for the cheapest ticket because there was none to spare — they were not just being killjoys. When Perippa started earning money, he was a “first day, first show” kind of guy. He eventually became a film buff. The man did not just watch movies, he read everything he could about them as well – I dare say he would have read the articles on Baradwaj Rangan’s blog too. Big words never fazed him.
When the 1990’s got under way, inexpensive video players, and the rise of television channels devoted exclusively to movies, led to the demise of many theatres worldwide. Madurai, the city of cinema theatres, was no exception. In the end, Thangam’s size was its undoing — it had become something of a white elephant. The crowds thinned out, and it was curtains for the theatre in 1995 — the last movie to be screened there was a film, dubbed from Telugu.
The once popular theatre stood forlorn and derelict.
In August 2011, Demolition Day finally arrived. Movie-goers gathered in the old Kakkathoppe neighborhood to pay their final respects to the theatre. An entire generation of filmgoers had not watched a film in this grand old theatre — so those who had gathered were mostly old movie buffs, mostly men. Many wept openly. Audiences evidently do not think of old movie theatres as mere buildings — for many, a place like Thangam Theatre had been a temporary refuge from the continuous battle which is life.
In a scene right out of a melodramatic film, clouds gathered overhead and kept up a steady unseasonal drizzle in sympathy with all those old patrons of Thangam. I can imagine Perippa standing in that crowd, not even trying to hold back the tears.
There is another thing they say about the donkeys of Madurai — they never migrate. Perippa lived and died in his hometown Madurai in 2016. The place has no special meaning for me now because the people who made the place special to me are all gone.
Parasakthi: Life and Times of a DMK Film
, Vol. 26, No. 11/12, Annual Number (Mar., 1991), pp. 759-761+763-765+767+769-770 (9 pages)
